Python used to have limited parallelism, due to its global interpreter lock (GIL). Only one thread could run Python code at a time. Python 3.14 comes in a free-threaded version ( python3.14t ), without the global interpreter lock. Several threads can now run Python code at the same time. Let us pick a realistic problem. GitHub publishes everything that happens on its public repositories: pushes, issues, pull requests, stars, and so forth. The GH Archive project collects these events a...

New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds : Tab colors Set Tab Color ( CmdSetTabColor , on a tab’s right-click menu) gives a document’s tab a custom color ( #2725 ). Search box on the home page The home page has a search box above the thumbnails that filters recently opened files by name, with the matching part highlighted. Ctrl + F focuses it, and Esc clears it. Chrome-like tab closing, context menu highlight, find tweak ...

Lance blogged on the OpenAI solutions to many problems  here  and also created a website of the TCS-related problems OpenAI claims to have solved  here . Terry Tao seems to have had an infinite number of guest bloggers talking about AI and Math even before the OpenAI .... WE NEED A WORD FOR IT. My proofreader suggests GARBARGE DUMP. I prefer the more neutral DOCUMENT DUMP.  Scott blogged about what he calls  the Mathocalypse PeteWoit weighted in on what he calls  the Slopocalypse .  He ha...

"System one" decision models are models that infer and respond with calibrated probabilities or every allowed answer. Consider your everyday language model, to get typed output from it (JSON), you may use Structured Output to constrain the output to guaranteed valid JSON. While model prefills the input in one pass, it still has to go perform a pass for every token in order to generate a valid response. In this example, 11 passes are required to generate the final output. (We're not accounting...

Sometimes it's easier to identify an IC with a microscope. While sorting a box of old ICs, CuriousMarc came across some Harris ICs labeled "F1-10-5", a mysterious part number that didn't show up in any databooks. Since unidentifiable ICs are useless, he gave me one to analyze. Conveniently, it was in a ceramic package, so I could open it up with a quick tap from a chisel. Under the microscope, the chip's most striking feature was a grid of square capacitors. With all those capacitors, I guessed...

The first time I used a coding agent, I was mesmerized . Before the agent, I was copy/pasting between my IDE and an AI chat interface. It was amazing to see an agent edit files directly and fix its own errors in real time. After a few days, the honeymoon wore off as I encountered frequent bugs. The agent would stop responding entirely until I restarted it. Development workflows felt stiflingly primitive, and the agent would often declare tasks finished when work had barely begun. This was i...

In this post, I argue that individual intellectual activity can only be sustained in an intellectual community of other humans. AI dissolves these communities, which in turn makes private intellectual activity rarer. The Case of Software Some years ago, when it became clear that AI would solve software engineering, my thinking was: In my professional life, I’m happy to move one level up to become a manager of AI agents. I’m literate, I’m a good technical writer, I can describe...

On Git Refs Oct 7, 2026 I have recently improved my mental model of Git. Consider these two git commands: $ git fetch origin master $ git switch -c my-feature origin/master Do you understand why is it origin master in one command, and origin/master in the other? I didn’t, until a few weeks ago! My understanding was that git is a content-addressable database. Git stores commits, a commit is identified by the hash of its content, and the content of a commit is, prim...

Aviva Ireland ranked first on the Sunday Independent and Statista list of Ireland’s 200 Best Employers for 2026, and second among super-large organisations on Great Place to Work Ireland’s list. Those two employee-surveyed rankings define the best companies to work for in Ireland this year. This guide covers who placed where, how each list works, and what CSO pay and jobs data show for the same period. Best Companies to Work for in Ireland No. 1 Aviva Ireland on Ireland’s Best Emp...

Artemis updates Illustration of a SpaceX Starship lunar lander prototype docked with the Orion spacecraft in Earth orbit, as would be attempted for NASA’s Artemis III mission. Image: SpaceX / NASA On September 14, SpaceX’s Starship Super Heavy rocket reached orbit for the first time, seven years later than originally touted , continuing its slow progress in building a Lunar Starship ready to land Artemis astronauts on the Moon for NASA. As Marcia Smith reported , the orbital flight ...

The Miraculous Draft of Fishes, by Konrad Witz, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at propane in air conditioners, Anduril making submarine parts, nuclear reactors on the moon, the robotic hand landscape (handscape?), and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing Someone created a city building game wher...

There was a time I'd look at a board like the Radxa Dragon Q8B (at left, above) and be like, "there's no way I'd spend $209 on an SBC with 8 gigs of RAM". But we're in 2026, and seeing the 8 gig Raspberry Pi 5 going for almost the same amount, I figured I'd give it a shot. On paper , the Q8B beats the Pi 5 in pretty much every way. A lot of that is thanks to this Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chip, which is the same chip I tested on Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023 . There was a time I'd look...

I shipped a new feature for my blog today: the Newsletters page, which offers an index of all of the newsletters I've sent out, both my free weekly Substack and my monthly sponsors-only updates. I built the feature almost entirely using my voice, chatting away to my laptop while I cooked dinner. Codex voice mode I used the ChatGPT desktop app for this, in the Codex tab, using the voice conversation mode, running against a local development environment. Here's what that looks like: ...

Hello, Welcome to another Friday. Asteroid damage changes Bilka In 2.0, asteroids dealt damage to space platforms based on the relative speed of the asteroid and the collision would cause the asteroid to slow down. After an asteroid dealt a certain amount of damage, it would simply disappear. It was a bit strange to have the asteroids suddenly disappear into thin air with no indication of when it would happen. As you may have already experienced, version 2.1 reworks this...

The Firefox team just launched a website that allows users to rank the Interop 2027 proposals that they care about. And I care about things - for selfish reasons and for work. And that's a challenge. I want to rank things that only benefit me and my blog but I also want to rank things that would make my daily job easier. Or, at least, allow me to delete a lot of code. So I settled with a balance of five for each. My final ranking: CSS random() function CSS corner-shape property C...

More than a year ago I wrote a few posts here that recommended people not to load custom tools into their context (or MCP servers) but to just use more scripts. Most importantly I wrote that Code Is All You Need and I wrote about that MCP needs code . With Pi 1.0 we now added MCP support via Codemode which in some ways is a long time coming, but then also maybe somewhat surprising to some. So I want to share some updated thoughts on this blog on what this all means. What Are Tools Wh...

I was back on Mastodon for less than a week before I’d seen a few Takes™ linked to that were so banal, so contemptuous, and so absurd, I felt the need to write about them. I’d know, because I’m looking at my drafts folder now. Hundreds of words. I didn’t like writing them. You wouldn’t have liked reading them. I left my lunch break feeling deflated not accomplished. fsck(8) . The answer here isn’t sticking my head in the sand. Here comes the proverbial posterior prognosticatio...

Many software engineers are righteously angry about AI. It’s understandable to be upset that the skills you built your professional identity around are getting automated away. But software engineers are the last people in the world who should be complaining about this. If you live by the sword, you will perish by the sword 1 . Software engineering has always automated industries From the very beginning, software engineering has been about automating other people’s work. Every singl...

The twenty-second episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 22, I chat with Tracy , the author of tracydurnell.com about, how websites fit into writing, writing series of posts, websites as part of conversations, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. The episode was released on Tuesday, October 11th. I usually publish the blog post announcement on the day of ...

First fire of the year and Sid is loving it. Not sure we appreciated the giant queen wasp that came bumbling out of the chimney though. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . First fire of the year and Sid is loving it. Not sure we appreciated the giant queen wasp that came bu...

The first post in this series introduced Frml , a little procedural language I created so that I could learn how program verification works. The second explained how Frml checks simple scalar code; this one explains how it checks programs with multiple functions. As a reminder, the scalar prover owns the engine and leaves two hooks for higher levels: def verify_function ( self , fn ): state = State () for p in fn . params : state . vars [ p . name ] =...

$150 million agreement modification supports Defense Exportability Features and is matched by $150 million in Shield AI capital     WASHINGTON (October 8, 2026) — Shield AI today announced that the U.S. Navy has executed a $150 million modification to its existing Other Transaction (OT) agreement with the company to advance X-BAT, an AI-piloted, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) fighter aircraft.     The Navy executed the $150 million modification with funding from the Office of...

Monte Carlo simulations (or methods ) is the technique of applying randomness and the Law of large numbers to the solution of various scientific and engineering problems. One of its first documented uses was by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann for nuclear weapon simulations after WWII [1] . In this post I want to provide examples of some simple uses of Monte Carlo simulations. We'll start with the classical example of calculating the value of \pi by throwing darts. Estimating pi ...